In the beginning, broadcasters sold ads to pay for content. Now, broadcasters work on content to sell ads
I must make a minor but important point about this. Brodcasters do not sell ads. Advertising companies sell ads. Broadcasters sell viewers. They create shows to create viewers to sell them to advertisers.
You beat me to the punch on bitching about this!:-) They comment that Explorer is a consistant and standards compliant browser? In whose universe? I've seen Explorer load a page differently on each of three consecutive loads! Explorer doesn't support framesets properly, and...blah! Must stop before I degenerate into incoherant hate filled babbling...
I've been using iCab for a couple years now and have only recently become unhappy with it. Their support for nested tables has gone to hell, and they seem to support many elements of CSS sporadically (sp?) at best. I still use it and enjoy it (my god, what would I do without their image blocking, contextual menu, error report, etc.?), but I wish they would re-fix their damn tables!
It is the most configurable, compact browser I have ever used. Stable as hell, snappy and very well thought out.
Hear, hear! I switched to iCab way back when because I will *never* use Explorer as my main browser and NN is so bloated it was making me sick. iCab is light and fast. It would be nice if they took a lesson from Mozilla's form manager though...
By flashing a single frame of a heaping bucket of buttery popcorn every once in a while during the movie they were able to convince the viewers that they should buy some popcorn during the intermission (remember those?)
I'm sure that somebody will point out if I am wrong, but IIRC that is urban legend. Not the part about the subliminal advertising, but the part about it working. Subliminal messages *do* work, don't get me wrong, but not at that level. You see, your subconcious does not include concepts like "pop-corn" or like "coka-cola." What subliminal messages do is subtly alter moods.
The way that they tested this was to flash a series of (images/faces I don't remember which and am too lazy to Google for it) repeatedly. Each participant was asked to comment whether the image/face was positive or negative. By flashing "horror" images for a micro-second just before the image (meaning, dead people, pictures of corpses, rabid dogs, bleeding wounds) there was a slight but noticable increase in the negative responses. By flashing positive images (clouds, children, bright things) there was a similar positive affect. The control group, of course, had no such images flashed.
There has been no proof that these theater adds worked, and rather substantial proof that they didn't.
there's no realistic expectation of an operational lunar base for a generation.
I hate to become overly pessimistic, but I fear that only the youngest among us may see a return to Luna; period. A lunar base is a whole 'nother story.:-(
One of the best authors who bridges this gap between "hard" and "soft" SF has gotta be David Brin. Space Operas with a nice background in real physics, etc. And, very importantly, not just Hamlet in space kind of stories!
Personally, I loved The Dispossessed. I found the narrative compelling and exciting. But then, I tend to go for idea driven stuff, at which Le Guin excells! The most important thing, and it seems that you would probably agree, is that she is undeniably a top-tier writer. She can craft words with the best of them. I think that is why there are very few stories by her that I did not find enjoyable and worth-while.
I'm afraid that I have to slightly disagree with you both. I think that the universe is a fundamental part of the stories. In your example, the Foundation in our world might make the same point, but could not be even close to the same story. The universe defines the story and establishes whatever/any points that an author is making.
Just mentioning his name might start a flame war, but I think that Harlan Ellison is a great example of this. Every story he writes is centered around creating a universe. Fantastic things happen, or fantastic people exist, etc because there is a Universe that exists to support it.
This may be metaphysical dickering, but IMO part of the point of SF is that it is not our universe.
I'm stumped as to how this thing made it out the door. Is it the market researchers? Did they ever put one of these phones in someone's hands? Or did they ask questions like "What would you like in a phone" and then screw up the consumer vision by sacrificing the most fundamental (and implicitly necessary) features?
Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer designs the car for his brother Herb?:-) If only MS suffered the same fate....
As an owner of one of these systems, perhaps you can answer the question that has been nagging at my mind...how strong is the pivot hinge on these things? I have a recurring image of piles of these things sitting in a Goodwill in 10 years with the hinge snapped in two. Do you need to be careful when you pivot it? Do you feel worried that someone who is not used to using it might snap it off or bend it? If these questions are hopelessly ignorant, please enlighten me.
I've been involved in different kinds of mobile services projects for 3 1/2 years and the whole time the hype about location based services has been going on. I've never ever seen anyone use any kind of location based service in "real life" yet.
I don't know if there is anyone out there with more info, but isn't this exactly what Steve Wozniak is currently working on? That is the impression that I have received from his web-site. Does anyone out there have more info? I am far more interested in what Wozniak has cooking than all of the cell networks put together.
LOL! I recomend that to everyone who asks me about the books: Don't bother with the poetry unless you are a big poetry fan! It has no importance to the story, and is only interesting after two or three readings.
Now, a bunch of assholes out to get around their own inability to deal with the consequences their actions have bestowed upon them, are out to ruin it for everyone else.
Hmmmm....it seems to me that they are doing precisely what you are accusing them of not doing, dealing with the consequences of their actions. The consequences where banishment, and these chaps dealt with it. You don't like it. In your eloquent words: BooHoo..
Too bad no one wants to own up to their own hypocrisy
Ahhhh, somebody found an opportunity to stand on a soap-box! Good for you! Too bad that there is nothing of hypocrisy in what these guys did. In fact, it seems that their actions demonstrate a high degree of consistency...hacking a box to take modifications past all the security built in, hacking the box to get past the security built into the servers...please show me the hypocrisy, because I don't see it...
Mod all you like, but don't expect to be able to use their servers.
Unless you can change the MAC address and serial number of your modded box...this attempt to moralize the issue is very tired. They did it, MS will do something in response. That is the game that these guys love playing with their X-Boxes.
Well, that's called traditional cross-breeding, and it's been practiced by humans intentionally and unintentionally pretty much since the day when we started building mud huts and stopped following animals around.
Ah yes, I remember well the time that grand-pappy taught me the wonders of cross-breeding. You see we had this tomato and this sturgeon. We wanted some of the traits of the sturgeon in the tomato crops so we...or maybe not...Maybe you are over generalizing and out-right lying about the issue in order to support your own view point? Maybe this is what every-one concerned is doin? Wow, I'm shocked and dismayed to learn that people tend to have biased viewpoints on controversial subjects!
The reaction to genetically altered foods in this country (and Europe), espcially the reaction of people of reason, is baffling to me.
Methinks that your knee-jerk defense of the technology does not help in piercing the clouds of misunderstanding. You have fallen into the all too common logical trap of excluding the middle option(s) and viewing the issue as black and white. Your entire post sounded idiotic with your comparing laboratory based gene manipulation to cross-pollenation and selective breeding. Yes, you make good points about the possible benefits of this technology and the irresponsible nature of many of its opponents. Why did you feel it necesary to invalidate these points by resorting to hyberbole and misinformation? Why must you defend the biotech companies because the technology that makes their business profitable has positive implications?
The last 10,000 or so years have been very stable, but it was in and out of ice ages for hundreds of thousands of years before that.
And we're not quite sure what normal temperature should be, anyway.
I think that you may have answered your own question! &quo Normal Temperatures &quo, I say in quotes as it is not temperature but climate that is the issue, is glacial! We are in on one of the regular interglacial periods that lie amidst the more usual ice-ages that mark the Earth. Ice Ages where the normal temperature fluctuates by almost 100 times the magnitude of fluctuations we see today. That's right, multiply that delta in Minnesotas yearly weather by 100. Sounds pleasant to me, not.
You saidIn a situation like that, you have two options:
Give the market what it wants, regardless of whether that's what the market should actually have in your opinion
Tell the market how foolish it is for wanting that, and watch other people make money off providing it.
I would add:
Diversify your investments and caution investors against foolishly gambling their money on a cycle doomed to loose them money while using enormous wealth to cushion the fall
But then, the tactic of moderation in investments wouldn't have allowed the investment banks to make billions of dollars on the backs of individual's retirement funds.
What I don't get is why don't these projects realize the kind of coup they could score by releasing a Mandrake/RedHatesque installer that even the average marketting drone could use to setup a fully operational installation.
Unwittingly, you have answered your own question. They will probably never release an easy installer for OpenBSD because a marketing drone is not their target audience. If you are in an organization where a marketing drone is responsible for setting up firewalls and routers (the two general systems that will most frequently be running OpenBSD), than your organization is in deep doo-doo!:-)
OpenBSD is targeted at the audience that knows enough about their systems to feel comfortable without an installer, who will probably feel more comfortable without an installer. See, the thing about installers is that you have to trust what they are doing. Most admins who are worried about security enough to want to install OpenBSD will probably not want to put a whole lot of faith in any installer that they have not scripted/written themselves. (this is all IMO, of course, as there are probably large numbers of OpenBSD users that would not fit my stereotypes)
Do you really need to dog-ear the pages if you can simply do a search on the book for everywhere you wrote 'cool quote'
Or, to continue off the wall speculation, just underline the section (touch screen, or stylus) and draw up a page with all of the underlined sections together. Add the ability to make notes, etc and attatch them to the section and this becomes a primo study aid. I wish that I could hit a button and get a page or two of all the notes that I've made in the margins of many books (seperately, or together...hmmm cross inexing...)!!!
Not in America. If your roommate gets caught with some pot . . . or pretty much anything that can be used in any way to make an illicit chemical, you lose your stuff
Not only that, but anyone related to you will lose their federal housing assistance money. Nightmarish.
We do not have a two party system, it is just that currently (and usually) only two of the parties are able to garner enough votes to even be considered.
Pay attention in a couple weeks at election time, or better yet in a couple of years when we get the chance to de-throne George II. On a national level there is very little formulazation of the two-party system (apart from the way that commitees are formed and government election money is aportioned), but at the intersection of the local/state and the national there is quite a bit.
Check the laws on how votes are tallied, on how districts are formed and on how electoral votes are decided are often implicitly if not explicitly two party. A lot of this comes not from a specific party bias (parties tend to die off and get replaced every 50-70 years aprox. in the US), but from a paradigm of politics that views candidates as being the important piece of the puzzle. This is viewed best in contrast to a proportional view (most of European government) that put the emphasis on the party: that is to say, on the ideology.
The system has virtually no input because virtually nobody votes. It is rare to even get a 20% turnout. There are major differences between the parties, it is just that they are rarely talked about on political TV ads. Instead, the ads state
You are not considering the why behind these non-votes. The reasons are/could be legion but all boil down to a percieved dis-empowerment at the personal level. A great deal of this could be seen to arrise from the fact that the winner takes all in an election. If you vote for a loser, your vote is discarded entirely. Also, as you state, there are differences between the parties, but not between the candidates. But, who do you vote for? Even if you vote the party line, you are still voting for candidates, not parties. See how much that affects the advertisements?
The are four main political views in America today. They are Libertarianism, Conservativism, Liberalism, and Socialism.
That is such a gross generalization and simplification that it is not even worthwhile responding to this or the paragraphs of useless platitues and personal assumptions that follow it.
Most U.S. citizens are spoiled by not having direct first-hand experience with a big league oppressive regime. Take a 6 month bus tour of Central America and tell me when you get back that we aren't lucky to have the luxury to be actually arguing over something like a ballistics database.
I one hundred percent agree with you. It bears repeating every time this point is brought up, however, that the insecurity in many other countries (especially S. and C. America) is a direct result of US foreign policy.
That much is not arguable. What is debatable is to what degree our peace, prosperity and relative liberty has been purchased with the blood of our neighbors to the south.
In a probably vain attempt to be on-topic, attempts at de-privatizing (and sometimes nationalizing) resources like telephones and such have been some of the justifications that we (as a citizen of the US I think it necesary to use the first person plural when referring to the government) have historically used to fund/incite revolutions in these very nations under discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
I must make a minor but important point about this. Brodcasters do not sell ads. Advertising companies sell ads. Broadcasters sell viewers. They create shows to create viewers to sell them to advertisers.
And then there was the lawyer who stepped in the pile of horse shit and thought that he was melting. *rimshot*
You beat me to the punch on bitching about this! :-) They comment that Explorer is a consistant and standards compliant browser? In whose universe? I've seen Explorer load a page differently on each of three consecutive loads! Explorer doesn't support framesets properly, and...blah! Must stop before I degenerate into incoherant hate filled babbling...
I've been using iCab for a couple years now and have only recently become unhappy with it. Their support for nested tables has gone to hell, and they seem to support many elements of CSS sporadically (sp?) at best. I still use it and enjoy it (my god, what would I do without their image blocking, contextual menu, error report, etc.?), but I wish they would re-fix their damn tables!
It is the most configurable, compact browser I have ever used. Stable as hell, snappy and very well thought out.Hear, hear! I switched to iCab way back when because I will *never* use Explorer as my main browser and NN is so bloated it was making me sick. iCab is light and fast. It would be nice if they took a lesson from Mozilla's form manager though...
I'm sure that somebody will point out if I am wrong, but IIRC that is urban legend. Not the part about the subliminal advertising, but the part about it working. Subliminal messages *do* work, don't get me wrong, but not at that level. You see, your subconcious does not include concepts like "pop-corn" or like "coka-cola." What subliminal messages do is subtly alter moods.
The way that they tested this was to flash a series of (images/faces I don't remember which and am too lazy to Google for it) repeatedly. Each participant was asked to comment whether the image/face was positive or negative. By flashing "horror" images for a micro-second just before the image (meaning, dead people, pictures of corpses, rabid dogs, bleeding wounds) there was a slight but noticable increase in the negative responses. By flashing positive images (clouds, children, bright things) there was a similar positive affect. The control group, of course, had no such images flashed.
There has been no proof that these theater adds worked, and rather substantial proof that they didn't.
I hate to become overly pessimistic, but I fear that only the youngest among us may see a return to Luna; period. A lunar base is a whole 'nother story. :-(
One of the best authors who bridges this gap between "hard" and "soft" SF has gotta be David Brin. Space Operas with a nice background in real physics, etc. And, very importantly, not just Hamlet in space kind of stories!
Personally, I loved The Dispossessed. I found the narrative compelling and exciting. But then, I tend to go for idea driven stuff, at which Le Guin excells! The most important thing, and it seems that you would probably agree, is that she is undeniably a top-tier writer. She can craft words with the best of them. I think that is why there are very few stories by her that I did not find enjoyable and worth-while.
I'm afraid that I have to slightly disagree with you both. I think that the universe is a fundamental part of the stories. In your example, the Foundation in our world might make the same point, but could not be even close to the same story. The universe defines the story and establishes whatever/any points that an author is making.
Just mentioning his name might start a flame war, but I think that Harlan Ellison is a great example of this. Every story he writes is centered around creating a universe. Fantastic things happen, or fantastic people exist, etc because there is a Universe that exists to support it.
This may be metaphysical dickering, but IMO part of the point of SF is that it is not our universe.
Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer designs the car for his brother Herb? :-) If only MS suffered the same fate....
In business school they would call that "Playing to one's strengths"
As an owner of one of these systems, perhaps you can answer the question that has been nagging at my mind...how strong is the pivot hinge on these things? I have a recurring image of piles of these things sitting in a Goodwill in 10 years with the hinge snapped in two. Do you need to be careful when you pivot it? Do you feel worried that someone who is not used to using it might snap it off or bend it? If these questions are hopelessly ignorant, please enlighten me.
I don't know if there is anyone out there with more info, but isn't this exactly what Steve Wozniak is currently working on? That is the impression that I have received from his web-site. Does anyone out there have more info? I am far more interested in what Wozniak has cooking than all of the cell networks put together.
LOL! I recomend that to everyone who asks me about the books: Don't bother with the poetry unless you are a big poetry fan! It has no importance to the story, and is only interesting after two or three readings.
C.F. "The Great Space Fuck" by Kurt Vonnegut? :-)
Hmmmm....it seems to me that they are doing precisely what you are accusing them of not doing, dealing with the consequences of their actions. The consequences where banishment, and these chaps dealt with it. You don't like it. In your eloquent words: BooHoo..
Too bad no one wants to own up to their own hypocrisyAhhhh, somebody found an opportunity to stand on a soap-box! Good for you! Too bad that there is nothing of hypocrisy in what these guys did. In fact, it seems that their actions demonstrate a high degree of consistency...hacking a box to take modifications past all the security built in, hacking the box to get past the security built into the servers...please show me the hypocrisy, because I don't see it...
Unless you can change the MAC address and serial number of your modded box...this attempt to moralize the issue is very tired. They did it, MS will do something in response. That is the game that these guys love playing with their X-Boxes.
Ah yes, I remember well the time that grand-pappy taught me the wonders of cross-breeding. You see we had this tomato and this sturgeon. We wanted some of the traits of the sturgeon in the tomato crops so we...or maybe not...Maybe you are over generalizing and out-right lying about the issue in order to support your own view point? Maybe this is what every-one concerned is doin? Wow, I'm shocked and dismayed to learn that people tend to have biased viewpoints on controversial subjects!
Methinks that your knee-jerk defense of the technology does not help in piercing the clouds of misunderstanding. You have fallen into the all too common logical trap of excluding the middle option(s) and viewing the issue as black and white. Your entire post sounded idiotic with your comparing laboratory based gene manipulation to cross-pollenation and selective breeding. Yes, you make good points about the possible benefits of this technology and the irresponsible nature of many of its opponents. Why did you feel it necesary to invalidate these points by resorting to hyberbole and misinformation? Why must you defend the biotech companies because the technology that makes their business profitable has positive implications?
I think that you may have answered your own question! &quo Normal Temperatures &quo, I say in quotes as it is not temperature but climate that is the issue, is glacial! We are in on one of the regular interglacial periods that lie amidst the more usual ice-ages that mark the Earth. Ice Ages where the normal temperature fluctuates by almost 100 times the magnitude of fluctuations we see today. That's right, multiply that delta in Minnesotas yearly weather by 100. Sounds pleasant to me, not.
- Give the market what it wants, regardless of whether that's what the market should actually have in your opinion
- Tell the market how foolish it is for wanting that, and watch other people make money off providing it.
I would add:But then, the tactic of moderation in investments wouldn't have allowed the investment banks to make billions of dollars on the backs of individual's retirement funds.
Unwittingly, you have answered your own question. They will probably never release an easy installer for OpenBSD because a marketing drone is not their target audience. If you are in an organization where a marketing drone is responsible for setting up firewalls and routers (the two general systems that will most frequently be running OpenBSD), than your organization is in deep doo-doo! :-)
OpenBSD is targeted at the audience that knows enough about their systems to feel comfortable without an installer, who will probably feel more comfortable without an installer. See, the thing about installers is that you have to trust what they are doing. Most admins who are worried about security enough to want to install OpenBSD will probably not want to put a whole lot of faith in any installer that they have not scripted/written themselves. (this is all IMO, of course, as there are probably large numbers of OpenBSD users that would not fit my stereotypes)
Or, to continue off the wall speculation, just underline the section (touch screen, or stylus) and draw up a page with all of the underlined sections together. Add the ability to make notes, etc and attatch them to the section and this becomes a primo study aid. I wish that I could hit a button and get a page or two of all the notes that I've made in the margins of many books (seperately, or together...hmmm cross inexing...)!!!
Not only that, but anyone related to you will lose their federal housing assistance money. Nightmarish.
Urrrrrkkk, no coffee, brain hurts
Pay attention in a couple weeks at election time, or better yet in a couple of years when we get the chance to de-throne George II. On a national level there is very little formulazation of the two-party system (apart from the way that commitees are formed and government election money is aportioned), but at the intersection of the local/state and the national there is quite a bit.
Check the laws on how votes are tallied, on how districts are formed and on how electoral votes are decided are often implicitly if not explicitly two party. A lot of this comes not from a specific party bias (parties tend to die off and get replaced every 50-70 years aprox. in the US), but from a paradigm of politics that views candidates as being the important piece of the puzzle. This is viewed best in contrast to a proportional view (most of European government) that put the emphasis on the party: that is to say, on the ideology.
You are not considering the why behind these non-votes. The reasons are/could be legion but all boil down to a percieved dis-empowerment at the personal level. A great deal of this could be seen to arrise from the fact that the winner takes all in an election. If you vote for a loser, your vote is discarded entirely. Also, as you state, there are differences between the parties, but not between the candidates. But, who do you vote for? Even if you vote the party line, you are still voting for candidates, not parties. See how much that affects the advertisements?
That is such a gross generalization and simplification that it is not even worthwhile responding to this or the paragraphs of useless platitues and personal assumptions that follow it.
I one hundred percent agree with you. It bears repeating every time this point is brought up, however, that the insecurity in many other countries (especially S. and C. America) is a direct result of US foreign policy.
That much is not arguable. What is debatable is to what degree our peace, prosperity and relative liberty has been purchased with the blood of our neighbors to the south.
In a probably vain attempt to be on-topic, attempts at de-privatizing (and sometimes nationalizing) resources like telephones and such have been some of the justifications that we (as a citizen of the US I think it necesary to use the first person plural when referring to the government) have historically used to fund/incite revolutions in these very nations under discussion.